Pink Floyd songwriter Roger Waters says making The Wall was ‘therapeutic’ process for dealing with early ‘trauma’

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Veteran songwriter and rock and roll legend Roger Waters says Pink Floyd‘s The Wall was a “therapeutic” writing process for him.

The 1979 hit would prove to be one of the band’s most popular works, with Waters even touring the album several times as a solo artist. One performance of The Wall saw him pair up with Van Morrison, The Band, and Bryan Adams during a massive live performance, which was later released as an album. But writing the album proved to be a necessary experience for Waters, who says it helped him process the traumas of losing his father during the Second World War and coming to terms with why he felt so alienated from people. Speaking of the album back in 2011, Waters shared how the album had helped him heal from the loss of his father, and why it was a “good thing” to make some noise with David Gilmour, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason.

He said: “Writing The Wall was a very important and therapeutic process for me. Also, it was a very important part of making sense of my feelings. Not only the trauma of losing my father, but also trying to make sense of the fact that I felt alienated from other people. Music can be hugely therapeutic on all levels. Just making a noise can be a good thing.”

Despite learning much about his own traumas during the writing of The Wall, Waters has given up hope on people having similar experiences and writing of them in a manner appropriate for modern music.

Waters said: “I do. There’s something about the mathematics of what we call music that affects something in our physiology and creates an emotional response that feels as if it causes a difference in one. I believe everything is connected. It’s like a pebble in a pond: the change might be infinitesimal, but it is a change nevertheless and the ripples spread. I’m not expecting any new revolution or for a new Dylan or Lennon to come along, but music changes all our lives every day.”

Modern musicians like Radiohead were knocked back by Waters, who claimed there was little interest in their work, despite it being “good”. He said: “That bit of my brain has no power, I think.

“It doesn’t attach. I don’t really listen to Radiohead. I’m sure it’s very good and everything – I’m absolutely sure it is because everybody says it is – but I listened to the albums, and they just didn’t move me in the same way, say, John Prine does. His is just extraordinarily eloquent music – and he lives on that plain with Neil [Young] and [John] Lennon.

“I don’t have satellite radio in my car yet – which is stupid and you can get whatever you want and as much of it as you want – but if I’m flipping through channels in the car I’ll stop for old stalwarts like Neil and John, but usually you can be certain that the thing you’ve stopped for is going to finish in three minutes and the thing that comes after it will be unlistenable. So you sort of don’t bother.

“That’s why I never watched MTV – because of the programming. Nothing ever seemed to go on long enough to be worth watching. And even if that particular video was interesting, you’d get something directly afterwards that inevitably wasn’t.”